It's not anger-- more like pragmatism. I'm not convinced that any Washington types would listen. But I have plenty of friends and family members who regularly ask for my advice on tech purchases. Many bought their first Apple products at my suggestion. I'm not telling them to patronize MS or Google instead... just to apply pressure, hold off on purchases until Apple gets out in front of this. No, Apple wasn't the first or worst offender, but this is my bit of leverage.

Who cares, really? Normally, I should be excited by this set of announcements, but I'm not now. Why? Because Apple is complicit in the largest expansion of government surveillance power in my lifetime... that we know of, at least. (That is, unless you believe their technicality-laden denial with wording nearly identical to several other of the named companies.) Every desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, and personal music player currently in my household is an Apple product, but until we get this sorted out, I'm not buying any more of their gear. And I'm recommending that family and friends do the same.

Hatch didn't join the U.S. Senate until 1977, well after the booster contract was awarded. It was his predecessor, Frank Moss, whose cozy relationship with then-NASA administrator James Fletcher (another well-connected Utah man) was widely suspected as a factor contributing to Thiokol's win.

Not quite, but you're on the right track. The three leading contenders (Lockheed, Thiokol, and United Technologies) all proposed segmented booster designs. Lockheed's were to be shipped by barge, in a vertical position, as opposed to the horizontal rail shipping used by Thiokol. (Not sure about UT.)

A fourth contender, Aerojet, proposed a single, monolithic booster, to be built at a new facility in South Florida and shipped up the intracoastal waterway by barge. But the additional cost of the new facility made that proposal less competitive, where the others assumed use of existing facilities.

[You're right; there's not much hard info about this online. I'm relying here on Malcolm McConnell's Challenger: A Major Malfunction (1988), which in turn relied heavily on Rogers Commission testimony.]

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday September 22, 2010 @09:32AM
from the kids-say-the-#@^*est-things dept.

tetrahedrassface writes "When the Sociolinguistics Symposium met earlier this month swearing scholar Timothy Jay revealed that an increase in child swearing is directly related to an increase in adult swearing. It seems that vulgarity is increasing as pop culture continues to popularize vulgarities. The blame lies with media, public figures, politicians, but mostly ourselves. From the article: 'Children as young as two are now dropping f-bombs, with researchers reporting that more kids are using profanity — and at earlier ages — than has been recorded in at least three decades.'"